Solutions

To implement changes to the Florida special education system, we will need to pass laws and bills and change how many of the policies in Florida are executed. There are many potential methods we could use to improve the Florida special education system. The most effective, although most unlikely, course of action is to increase funding. Increasing funding would solve most problems that the system faces, but it would be extremely difficult to make funds simply appear. We will solve other problems, such as the lack of help that students receive from schools, by requiring that schools help students with special needs. We will also mandate that websites that direct students with special needs to services be translated into multiple languages since nearly 30% of the population do not speak English.

Updating and Translating Florida's Agency for Persons with Disabilities Website

The first solution that we are recommending is updating and translating the Florida Agency for Persons with Disabilities website, which would take a series of steps to implement.

Planning of Website Update

The first step to updating the website is to plan the update, which starts with identifying how the site is performing and how it ranks on search pages. The next parts of this step are identifying who the website is serving, in this case users are primarily parents or guardians of children with disabilities and adults with disabilities, and what their needs are, looking at similar sites for inspiration, and identifying how much time, money, and resources you have to develop the site and maintain the site (N. Gross, personal communication, December 1, 2022). This step is very important because it puts where the website is at, where you want it to be, and what you have to get there clearly into perspective. The step that comes next is reviewing the current content in the website, which includes identifying what content is well written, up-to-date, and relevant, and separating it from the pieces of content that aren’t those things (Urato 2020). This step would ensure that the people updating the website later are only updating and putting time into changing the content that needs to be changed, which makes the process more efficient.

Website Pre-Development

The next stage is the pre-development stage, which begins with reviewing and reorganizing the sitemaps, which are diagrams that show the organization of the website’s pages (Urato 2020). This step allows for a more organized, modern, and user-friendly website organizational system to make it simpler for the people who use the website to find the information they are looking for. The step in the pre-development stage is to “create mockups of important pages and features”, such as the home page, and in this step no actual writing or images will be on the pages, instead there will be “dummy copy” and placeholder images (N. Gross, personal communication, December 1, 2022). This step allows the User Experience, Search Engine Optimization, and flow of information to be improved, thus making the website easier to navigate and use. At this time the real writing, also called copy, should be being written, and the copy should be written in wording that the users, who in this case are primarily parents, can understand. This copy writing step is extremely important, because parents, not people who are educated in this field, are almost always the people who are researching about their child’s disability and how to get services for them (K. Alday, personal communication, December 3, 2022). If the parents don’t understand what the website is saying, then no matter how organized the website is, the parents won’t be able to gain much information or knowledge from their research.

Website Development

The next stage is the actual development of the website, which includes building the site in a development environment, implementing the Search Engine Optimization strategy into the building of the website, and testing and refining the website until it works properly (N. Gross, personal communication, December 1, 2022). The final step in updating the website would be to launch the website, by rolling over the changes from the development environment to the actual site, and then routinely watching key performance indicators, such as number of users and time on each page, in order to adjust as needed (N. Gross, personal communication, December 1, 2022).

Website Translation

The translating of the website would have to be done in different ways depending on what website building software is being used. The main part of the translation, which is translating the wording on the main parts of pages, would be done after the copy is written in English in the pre-development stage. The other parts of the website that would have to be translated, like menus, would happen differently with the different website building software being used.

Who Would Do This? And What Would Be Success?

If Florida’s Agency for Persons with Disabilities has a person or group of people who work on the website, then most of the work in this solution would be done by them. The copy writing would probably happen with a general copywriting team within the agency, the more difficult development might be done by outside services, and the translation of the copy writing would also probably be done by an outside translation service. The success of this solution would be demonstrated by a higher user rate, lower bounce rate, which is the rate at which users go onto one page and then leave the entire website, and higher ratings of understandability and ease of navigation from users when a survey is conducted.

Creating a Legislative Policy

The second solution that we are recommending is creating a legislative policy that would require the school systems and psychiatrists to assist parents with finding and obtaining services for their child with developmental disabilities. This policy would be classified as a “general law” in the state of Florida because the policy would have a statewide application. The policy being classified as a “general law” makes the proposal process more efficient than if the policy was a “local law” that only is applied to a certain region of the state or another special type of law.

Preparing to Draft the Policy

The first step in implementing this solution would be preparing to draft the policy. The first part of this step is to define in detail what the objective and intention of the proposal is. The next parts are to research what existing laws currently provide and to figure out if the policy we are proposing is constitutional with both the Florida Constitution and the US Constitution. The final part of this step is to create an outline of the organization of the policy. This step is very important to do well so that later on when the draft is being written or revised, there is less work to do to fill in the gaps of information that were forgotten about while writing.

Draft the Policy

The second step in implementing this solution would be drafting the legislative policy. The first part of this step is to write the draft of the policy following the outline and using the information found in the Preparing to Draft the Policy step. Once the draft is written, it is very important to review the draft with a basic quality control checklist. The criteria for passing the checklist is: the draft only includes the most current Florida statute text, the draft’s new provisions are not already covered by another present law in Florida, any new language that contains a cross-reference to a section of Florida statutes doesn’t have an unintended effect for the intended result, the draft complies in structure and content with legislative rules and constitutional requirements, effective dates are appropriate for the subject matter and the intent of the draft. The next part of this step is to have someone who wasn’t part of the drafting process read the draft and give revision comments. Then, make any revisions that arose from the quality control checklist. After the draft is fully written and revised, write a request for the drafting of legislation in LEAGIS. LEAGIS is a system that allows “district and local staff to prepare clear and accurate draft requests” without the possibility of using out-of-date Florida Statute text. Finally, submit the request for the drafting of legislation and the draft of the legislation to House Bill Drafting Service via LEAGIS.

Redrafting the Policy

The third step in implementing this solution would be redrafting. This would include making any changes to the draft of the policy that the House Bill Drafting Service indicates needs to be changed. The final part of this step is to resubmit the request for a drafting of legislation and the revised draft of the legislation to the House Bill Drafting Service via LEAGIS.

Approval and Legislative Process

After the legislative policy is approved by the House Bill Drafting Service, the policy enters the legislative process in the Florida House of Representatives, and if it is passed in the House, then it goes through the legislative process in the Florida Senate. If it passes both the House and the Senate chambers, then the policy goes to the governor to hopefully be passed into a law.

What Would Be Success?

This solution would be considered successful if the legislative policy is passed and becomes a Florida state law. It could be considered partially successful if it doesn’t pass but it inspires another bill in the future or if it doesn’t pass but it increases awareness to the problems surrounding access to services for people with developmental disabilities because that might spur other kinds of future action on this topic too.